What’s New in Google Analytics for Firebase

Recently, I posted an Overview of Google Analytics for Firebase. If you haven’t read that article yet, I’d suggest starting there. Next, I want to recap some of the exciting new features announced this year at Google I/O (May, 2018). The first, and this is a big one, is ‘Project-level Reporting’. What does that mean? Previously, In Google Analytics for Firebase, you would have individual Apps within Projects. Each app would have it’s own reporting section (you would toggle between iOS and Android via a dropdown on the top left to choose which version of your app you wanted to analyze). What does this mean to you? Now, instead of having to toggle between apps to analyze your data separately, you can analyze it together. Of course, you can still
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New Data Retention Policies in Google Analytics

This post reflects my personal thoughts (me = Krista Seiden) and in no way speaks on behalf of Google or Google Analytics. I’m not a lawyer and am not pretending to offer any sort of legal advice with the below post.   Now that the legal statements are out of the way, I want to be sure that my readers have the same understanding of some of the new settings taking effect in Google Analytics on May 25th, 2018 as I do. Starting May 25th, new data retention policies for Google Analytics will take effect. What is Data Retention you might ask? It’s the term used to describe the amount of time (in months in this case) that Google Analytics will retain property data beyond standard reporting. What is ‘Standard
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Using Event Tagging for Form Field Tracking

Many, many websites have forms on them: Subscription forms, Contact forms, Sign-up forms, etc. Understanding how users to your site or app interact with your form, and how they are succeeding through the form, or dropping out of the form, is an important key performance indicator (KPI) for your business to track. There are a lot of tools out there that have a specific purpose for form field tracking, but why use a separate tool when you can do it well with one you are already using? Using Google Analytics Event Tracking is a great way to track form field interaction on your sites and to create fallout funnels to understand success or lack there of for your forms. The benefit of using a tool you already have is data
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An Overview of Google Analytics for Firebase

In this post, I’m going to walk you through an overview of the Google Analytics for Firebase platform, including an overview of the out of the box reports you get with the Firebase SDK. What: Google Analytics for Firebase is the latest mobile analytics tracking platform from Google. This is meant as the next generation of mobile app tracking, taking the place of the Google Analytics Services SDK (this SDK is still supported in maintenance mode but is not being built on). Why: The Google Analytics Services SDK was built off of the web analytics model of Google Analytics. Google Analytics for Firebase (GA4F) was built from the ground up as an app-centric analytics platform, enabling it to track app type actions in a much more intuitive way When: Firebase Analytics
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Step-by-Step: New Element Visibility Trigger

As I mentioned in my post on the New Scroll Tracking Trigger, Google Tag Manager has just launched 2 new, exciting triggers. The second of those is one called ‘Element Visibility’. Depending on your use cases, this is likely even more exciting than Scroll Tracking (although I’d say that one was pretty damn exciting considering countless people have spent hours upon hours come up with technical solutions, blogging, and speaking about something as simple (in concept) as Scroll Tracking). With Element Visibility, you can now trigger a tag to fire based on an element on your site being in the viewport. You can specify the percentage of pixels that must be in the viewport (ex. 50% of the element’s pixels must be visible to count, a standard in viewability today),
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Step-by-Step: New Scroll Depth Trigger in Google Tag Manager

How far down my page did users go? Did they actually see the content below the fold? <— Said every executive ever to every analyst ever Scroll depth tracking has always been somewhat of a pain to setup in Google Analytics. Sure, there are guides like this one from Justin Cutroni, and there are WordPress plugins, but let’s be honest, until now, there haven’t been any good solutions to easily do this in Google Analytics. It’s required a ton of code and a developer to implement. Until now being the important words in that sentence… Google Tag Manager has just released a few new triggers, one of which is called “Scroll Depth” (and I can’t be more excited!!). This trigger allows you to easily setup a tag to track the
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Marketing Campaign Attribution – Take 2

It’s been 3+ years since I wrote my original blog post (https://www.kristaseiden.com/guide-ga-tracking-for-marketing-campaigns/) on campaign tracking, but it’s one that has aged well. I still point people to this post when they ask me for more info on best practices for setting up UTM tracking (or campaign tracking) because for the most part, things haven’t changed. I still recommend the below hierarchy for manual tagging of campaigns, using the (up to) 5 UTM parameter slots available to you in the URL: Campaign -name of your overarching campaign – e.g. spring-2013-collection or summer-2013-announcements. Be sure to follow a consistent campaign naming structure. Medium – the medium used to send your campaign. Include “email” for an email campaign, “cpc” for ads, “social” for a social network or “landing-page” if you’re tracking button clicks from a landing
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Personalizing with Google Analytics Audiences in Optimize 360

As analysts, we know a decent amount about our online customers, because we can see their online behavior. We know where they came from (geographically or traffic source), what they are looking at or clicking on our website, and whether or not they’ve completed our goals or KPIs (such as going through a checkout process and purchasing a product). With analytics, we are able to slice and dice our data to separate our customers based on their actions, demographics, and interests, and yet, most of the time, we are still serving them the exact same website experience. When asked, one of the common reasons I’ve heard this to be true is that it’s really hard to get data from an analytics tool to an optimization tool, and vice versa from
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5 Tips to Getting More out of Google Optimize

Martijn Scheijbeler and I recently presented at MeasureCamp London (and he again at MeasureCamp Amsterdam) on our best practices and tips for getting more out of Google Optimize. The response was great, so we decided to pen these thoughts as a blog post to share more broadly.   Tip #1: Identify key segments of users to target  (Krista) One of the things that makes Optimize so powerful is it’s deep integration with Google Analytics. You can use your Google Analytics data to identify key segments of users to target users as audiences shared Optimize. Examples: Loyal customers: Been to your site X times and purchased Y instances/value Status groups: Premium frequent fliers, Economy standard fliers Geo-location: Special offer for San Antonio residents Once you’ve identified these key audiences, create a unique
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